History and historiography of linguistics Ed. by Hans-Josef Niederehe and Konrad Koerner (review)

866 LANGUAGE, VOLUME 68, NUMBER 4 (1992) mentioned, but not referenced, in the Introduction ). The first four papers are not mainly about language. Emily W. Bushnell's 'The decline of visually guided reaching during infancy' (118 ) is a review essay reprinted from Infant behavior and development 8. David A. Rosenbaum 's 'Programs for movement sequences' (19-33) argues that motor planning and execution are hierarchical and that a phrase-structure grammar formalization can capture this insight. Lance J. Rips' 'Similarity and the structure of categories' (35-53) makes reference to Gleitman 's work on categorization, while Thomas F. Shipley's 'Perception of a unified world: The role of discontinuities' (55-88) is about visual perception. Five articles address different areas of linguistic theory: Ray Jackendoff & Barbara Landau. 'Spatial language and spatial cognition ' (145-69); Ann M. Reed, 'On interpreting partitives' (207-23); Geoffrey R. Coulter, 'On the relevance of traditional phonological analysis to the abstract patterns found in ASL and other signed languages' (225-45); John Goldsmith, 'Phonology as an intelligent system ' (247-67); and Robert May, 'Linguistic theory and the naturalist approach to semantics' (269-88). Reed claims that discourse entities are the key to explaining constraints on partitives, and Goldsmith's provocative title characterizes his theory of harmonic phonology. Five of the papers are classified by the editors as psycholinguistic, but Margaret B. Rawson 's 'Linguistics and dyslexia in language acquisition ' (131-43) is a nontechnical historical overview, and Elizabeth F. Shipley's 'Farewell to "thee"' (171-81), which attributes the decline of Quaker 'thee' to extrafamilial language models, might be better classified as sociolinguistic . D. D. Hilke's 'Infant vocalization and changes in experience' (89-104) is reprinted from the Journal ofChildLanguage 15; the data in Gary S. Dell & Paula M. Brown's 'Mechanisms for listener-adaptation in language production : Limiting the role of the "Model of the listener"' (105-29) is based on data published elsewhere, as is the act-out experiment reported in Thomas Hun-Tak Lee's 'Linearity as a scope principle for Chinese: The evidence from first language acquisition' (183-206). Lee's study suggests that children correctly use linearity to interpret Mandarin quantifier scope by age seven, but he does not acknowledge that act-out tasks may tap response biases rather than constraints. The quality and diversity of this Festschrift pay tribute to Lila Gleitman's influence on Swarthmore scholarship. Napoli & Kegl's failure to find thematic coherence is a minor flaw in an otherwise well-edited volume. [Ron Smyth, University of Toronto.] History and historiography of linguistics . 2 vols. Ed. by Hans-Josef Niederehe and Konrad Koerner. (Studies in the history of the language sciences, 51.) Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1990. Pp. xxv, 873. These two volumes contain papers from the Fourth International Conference on the History of the Language Sciences (ICHoLS IV), held in Trier on August 24-28, 1987. The papers cover a wide range of topics in the history of linguistics , extending from antiquity to the twentieth century. The book is divided into nine chapters, with a more or less chronological division (except for Ch. 3); predictably, most papers are drawn from the 18th and 19th centuries: Ch. 1, 'Generalia' (3-75), Ch. 2, 'Antike' (77-121), Ch. 3, 'Arabische Sprachwissenschaft' (123-71), Ch. 4, 'Mittelalter' (175-247), Ch. 5, 'Renaissance ' (249-336), Ch. 6. '17. Jahrhundert' (33796 ), Ch. 7, '18. Jahrhundert' (397-557), Ch. 8, '19. Jahrhundert' (559-771). and Ch. 9. '20. Jahrhundert' (773-848). In such a short review, only a cursory mention is possible of a few papers that have some general bearing on the history of our science. The paper by Vivien Law (Ch. 2, 89-96), on the question of authenticity of the Grammar of Dionysius Thrax, is of particular interest because she disputes the authenticity of this work, claiming that this Grammar is later than the time of its alleged author. Ch. 3 comprises four very interesting essays, one on the North Arabian pre-Islamic alphabet (by William T. Jobling) and the rest on Arabic grammar and lexicography (by Janusz Danecki, Kees Versteegh, and Mohammed Sawaie). In Ch. 4, Mirko Tavoni CYdioma Tripharium ', 233-47) rejects the idea of some modern historical linguists that...